well rest easy knowing that i would not be so hard on it if i hadn't watched the video. mellencamp goes down a lot smoother when i don't have to look at him. also wild night is one of those songs where i can't really understand how a cover would ever be necessary.

Like how does dude walk away from the Roots/Mad Men comparison being like "Wow, that doesn't get white people at all" instead of being like "It's really unfair to peg watching one of the most highly viewed TV events of all time as something indicative of the black experience in america"

Ezra Koenig is not incorrect about this. I might even replace “infrequently mentioned” with “infrequently even noticed.” For me, this was a constant surprise in reactions to Vampire Weekend’s debut: how often and how casually the band was described—or derided—as being white, or consisting of WASPs. Given how much it bothered me as a third party, I can only imagine how irritating it’d be to have white people criticize you for being “white” when you’re Persian; to have Protestants write you off as a WASP when you’re Jewish; maybe even to have people call you a WASP when your name is Baio.

This isn’t just pedantry about the meanings of words, though. Most of what people are trying to shorthand when they call indie acts “white” is set of ideas about social manner and social class: what they’re doing is fundamentally just a modern-American youth-culture spin on calling people bourgeois. (Obviously the last thing you’ll risk when calling out an indie band for being bourgeois is actually using an upscale word like “bourgeois.”) As always, much of it is a game of small differences: middle-class youth reprimanding one another for being whatever they’re most embarrassed to be. Koenig and Batmanglij can be those things, too—of course they can.

I don’t even object to the inevitable use of shorthand for those things. (The English have an interesting term: “student types.”) What surprises me, though, is how many white speakers—including people who are relatively savvy about race and culture—seem completely unbothered by the very obvious problems involved in using a racial shorthand for them. Some will quite casually use “white” as code for a certain set of qualities—safety, cleverness, politeness, education, middle-class manner, “literary” pretensions, alleged blandness—without, so far as I can tell, much noticing the shadow of opposites that casts on everyone else. (Danger? Vulgarity? Ignorance? Poverty? Savagery?) Some will argue, in earnest, that they’re actually taking the side of some vibrant other thing over bland, upscale whiteness—all without noticing how very old and familiar that line is. (Haven’t white audiences traditionally admired black artists as a source of transgression, of danger, of dirt, of “authenticity,” of “soul,” of “primitive” thrills?)

But even more than those obvious issues, I’m surprised by how this mode of thinking can lead people to actually misapprehend what’s right in front of their eyes—straight down to the ability to look at four guys in a band, one of them a Persian guy with the surname Batmanglij, and say, without missing a beat, that you’re looking at four white guys. The ability to look at a crowd at an indie show and claim that everyone’s white, even when you’re surrounded by two dozen east Asians. The ability to use “white” to mean “middle-class” to such an overwhelming extent that you actually start to misidentify people—all so that race itself, not class or background or culture or manner, can still remain the difference, the Other. There’s an odd habit here.